Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Wikipedia:ABOUT
WP:WIKIPEDIA
WP:HELLO
WP:SEW
WP:SEWP
WP:SIMPLE
The Simple English Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia for people who are learning English. The
Simple English Wikipedia's articles can be used to help with school homework or just for the fun of
learning about new ideas. Non-English Wikipedias can also translate from the articles here.
Wikipedia started on January 15, 2001 and it has over 35,000,000 articles in many languages,
including 179,784 in Simple English. Most of these articles are in languages other than English.
Every day hundreds of people from around the world make hundreds of changes and create lots of
new articles.
Note: Wikipedia has pages that some people might think are bad, vulgar or mean. Read the
Wikipedia content disclaimer for more information.
Contents
Simple English
Main article: Basic English
Simple English is similar to English, but it only uses basic words.
We suggest that articles should use only the 1,000 most common and basic words in English. They
should also use only simple grammar and shorter sentences. Writers can also use a special system,
for example, Basic English. Of course, people can write original articles; these could be put in both
this and the English Wikipedia (with a normal level of English). Usually, only about 2,000 words are
enough to write a normal article.
Since some articles need more than the most common words, some complex articles use more
words. But even very basic concepts (zero, one, two) are too difficult to explain with a small number
of words.
For detailed writing about science, politics, or religion, articles sometimes need more words, but the
English must be simple. Sometimes, an article needs words not included in the Basic English
combined wordlist, but it explains all the difficult words. Articles may also need some complex words
because of the article names in the ordinary English Wikipedia, and to use normal words would
make the article too simple. Articles on scientific topics might also need complex words.
There are no rules about vocabulary, tense or suffixes. Some articles use only Basic English (850
words), but this wiki has no strong rules about which words can be used, as E Prime does. If a word
is not simple or not used often here, it should be explained on a new page.
Be part of Wikipedia
Welcome, newcomers!, a place to start for new people.
Rules for how to behave on Wikipedia.
How to edit pages and do other things on Wikipedia.
Getting in touch
Contact us
Simple talk, a place to ask questions
Wikipedia mailing lists
Bug reports and feature requests
Wikipedians, a list of people who help with Wikipedia
Meta Wiki, more about Wikipedia and other projects like it